Progressive Disease Meant Carrying a Vodka Bottle in My Briefcase to the Office Men’s Room – Bob P.

Thank You Johnny and good afternoon friends my name is Bob and I'm an
alcoholic that's the worst part of the whole day like Betsy I'm just more
delighted than I can tell you to be here we I don't know any gathering of this
kind that we have really looked forward to so much for the many months since we
were first invited and I want to particularly thank Ralph C and Lawrence
and Gus and whoever else you know there's always so mysterious you never
know who really invites you but somewhere in there was a committee
that's responsible for giving Betsy and me the opportunity to come up to
Winnipeg again and we're very grateful of them and to you who after all you
paid for our way and so every single one of you we're very very grateful to it's
moving to come back here because of course every room and every foot of the
building and everything else is maxi to to us it's of course the first time that
we've been back since the beginning of the pandemic and we're very grateful to
you for that uh starting of this year now if you haven't been to our show
give it another try and let's thank all those who gave a hand and thanks to
you worth to kind of hand go for the everyone in your fancy and the
general well if you have some yours kind right we see you on thursday
in my office and uh everyone in here are proud of you and I'll be a pleasure to
talk to you we have to step off the business but I want to say thank you
again it's been a big chance to be here also a number of common folks it's
interesting it's been many years i maybe only three days of my young and thank yo
in many ways we still quote him and i think he will be quoted probably as long as a is around
and some of these things you know he was particularly hot about this this circle and
triangle up here and he always pointed out that there are three sides to that triangle recovery
and unity and service and that if you if you weren't in service then you weren't in aa that
that's a direct quote from from ovac and he he really walked like he talked in that regard
uh i have a you know a thousand memories of him starting with the time that he was delegate and
he was one of these people that i brought home to dinner uh that betsy was talking about before
way back when he was a delegate i probably forgot that i'd ever had him to dinner so when he came
back as a trustee he never let me forget that and i i particularly cherish the times down in
in new orleans at the international convention he had already been operated on once
for his cancer at that time and it was only a very few months afterwards and yet he was out
running and i'm a runner and so we were running together every morning uh around and around the
big uh superdome there and of course on on sunday morning he run on the same program as johnny as a
matter of fact uh he made uh to me just a landmark aa talk i think it was probably the finest single
aaa talk that i've ever had in my life and i think it was a great talk i think it was a great talk
i ever heard for a spiritual meeting on a on a sunday morning he was the epitome of of
acceptance and and reliance on his higher power and just a tower of strength to us all
but my favorite memory of him is being a program of attraction rather than promotion i uh i i i've
told about this so many times privately i'll just have to share it with you publicly
he
was uh when he was a trustee mac had been uh elected by the board of trustees to represent
aa in the united in the united states and canada actually he was i guess you'd say representing
canada uh at the world service meeting of alcoholics anonymous where all of the
countries where aa is organized in any way uh send delegates to meet together and to share their
experience and strength and hope country to country just like the delegates who come to the
general service conference come and and share the experience of their respective areas and
so this particular meeting happened to be held over in helsinki finland so here is uh mac from
the prairies of of manitoba and i'm you know originally from the prairies of kansas and here
we are over in this far corner of the world where we had no idea that we would ever be
and uh just the night before the meeting started uh
we went out to dinner you gotta eat somewhere you know and so we went to a restaurant there that
turned out to be a rather old restaurant with paneled walls and a fire in the fireplace and
the gleaming crystal and the gleaming uh china on the table and uh waiters and and white tie and
tails if you please and white gloves uh hovering over us and serving us this food and and mac and
norma were sitting there across the table from betsy and myself and a whole bunch of other aas
from the states and mac just sort of leaned back and he beamed and he leaned over the table very
confidentially to me and he said you know my sponsor never told me that alcoholics anonymous
would be like this isn't that wonderful
i should tell you that my home group is a wednesday night group in uh in greenwich connecticut
which is where we live and where i sobered up and where i still go to my home group a a meetings
and i'm also a member of the 468 group of alcoholics anonymous which is a meeting really
not a group the meeting being held every friday at 11 a.m at the address that gives the group its
name that's 468 park avenue south in new york city which is of course the address of your
general service office of alcoholics anonymous and and that's of course where i work as i work for you
and where we i would like to invite you to that meeting uh strangely enough quite a few people in
this room have been to that have been to that meeting it's the meeting that is held for the
sake of our own sobriety all of us who work at the general service office who are members of aa and
although there are about a hundred people
who work at the general service office and the AA grapevine there are only
about 15 of us who are AA members which is kind of surprising but that's the
way it is and so we have a meeting every Friday to share our own experience
strength and hope among each other but if we have any visitors there of course
we're just delighted to have them come and share with us and so I want to
extend that invitation to you right now to come in any time that you're in New
York don't ever come to that part of the country without coming to to pay us
a visit and we'll try to roll out the red carpet and make you feel at home and
pour you a cup of coffee and give you a chance to meet the staff members and and
look at the great old historical treasures of AA that are housed down in
the archives and and if it's on Friday why we'd love to have you attend that
meeting because I work at at the General Service
office
several of you have asked if I'm going to tell anything about the office and
you'll be relieved to know that I'm not but I would just like to mention for the
sake particularly of these wonderful people who are here rather new in their
sobriety a few weeks or a few months that again as a favorite saying of both
the C's of Mac was that AA is the only organization in the world where the
people who who belong to it don't know what they're doing and I think that's
the only organization in the world where the people who who belong to it don't
know what they're doing and I think that's the only organization in the world
they belong to and uh and i think that's that's really pretty true in the case of uh of not
knowing much very often we don't know i didn't know when i first came in much beyond my own
sobriety my own recovery and the group that i went to and i guess i'd been in in a for at least six
months before i ever came to a gathering anything like this and it just absolutely opened my eyes to
the fact that there was a whole world of sober people out there living normal happy lives very
happy lives without booze and and it was it was just sensational to me so i just want to tell
you that you who are new are belong to something that is very very big indeed we don't keep any
statistics we don't have any idea how many members there are in any way but we we do know that that
we have listed at the general service office in new york
that we have listed at the general service office in new york that we have listed at the general service office in new york
and at the other general service offices in other countries around the world
uh at least now well well over 50 000 a a groups so if you just think back to your own group and
multiply that by 50 000 and then multiply that by the number of meetings that many groups have
each week out there on the west coast you only have one group one meeting that's the rule out
there but my gosh you get into minnesota and some some listed groups have 20 meetings in a week
so you know you sort of average that
out and you see that there's uh oh maybe a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand meetings going on
every week somewhere in the world you multiply that by the number of people who are at the
average meeting they're not always 150 or 200 don but uh let's say they average 20 well you've got
at least two million people who are going to a a meetings this week somewhere in the world
take that for whatever those kind of figures are worth which is not much
people ask me you know uh how many how many aaa members are i say well if if you will if you will
tell me your definition of an aaa member then perhaps we can begin to count them
but nobody can agree on what's the definition of an aaa member so how are you going to count but
one of the things we do of course is is publish the literature and i just want to drop these on you
for you are here as part of our of religious and political members for the congregation
so we'll need a couple of our representatives to make those aaa money but now i want you to
spread out innumerable numbers and i want two of you in the midst of aaa groups
sãoetaan has a um it's a بعدback to indigenous many indigenous amount of aaa
members here it's one hundred and twenty mentioned to you um we make a million cameos at
every meeting we have eightistic and delinquent aaa aaa members and few others r begins and then another one percent
РИ Room m estado have had 20 thousand online aaabres for at least a year now in the last five to eight years, now those are only gospels of the 굉장히 reported worshipers for the zouka and some of the leadership Airles will be following them throughout the room for two and a half years,"
the uh first printing of the big book alcoholic synonymous back in 1939 was 5 000 copies and as
you'll recall that was a a good many years supply i don't know how many years it was but maybe a
dozen years before they ever sold out those 5 000 copies because aa was pretty small and it was
pretty painful growing in those days well today we sell 5 000 copies of the big book every other day
we sell 2 500 copies of the big book every single day so that's the way that this incredible
fellowship has grown even since you were there don i mean it just grows unbelievably don was at
one time the chairperson of the aa world services board which is of course my higher power
and if you i i couldn't tell you in a capsule any better what
service is all about what the general service office is all about than something which i'm
just prompted to do by something that happened during the coffee break here i want to tell you
those of you who don't know about it about a young aa member whose name was johnny johnny o
johnny was a marine who sobered up at canada in north carolina at camp lejeune the aaa group down
there and then he was sent over to beirut as a part of the quote peacekeeping unquote group
of a of marines who are going over there
i have an announcement tell tim theisen to meet his ride outside the door to the
belfry school created near the stadium who are in first grade and their birthday is the ione
doors of this room urgent so this marine with about a year and a half sobriety at
that time one overseas and the first that we ever heard of him he wrote to
the general service office he introduced himself and he asked if we had any
resources that was the word that he used resources to help him get a a started in
the Marines and in Lebanon over there in where he was and so the person who
was on the overseas assignment who was at that time Phyllis she wrote back to
Johnny and of course she sent him a lot of literature and gave him a lot of
encouragement and the next thing you know why he wrote back and gave us a
little a little progress report on how he was doing over there and he gave us a
little picture of how tough it was to be under bombardment and in a hostile land
and he was
really at that time a loner he had only one other prospect as he said that he
was working on and you guys that this guy also got the program and course they
were being transferred in and out of the headquarters building out to the lines
and so forth and so it was kind of tough getting anything started but then as
time went on he kept writing us
and course we kept writing him and very often with a different girl in the
officer with writing him and you love this because he felt the girls in the
office
The whole office was interested in him, which we were by this time.
He finally reported that they were having regular meetings in the headquarters building
in Beirut.
It chills me now to even think of what that meant, though we didn't know it at the time.
The higher power provides in strange ways.
We had somebody drop by the General Service office in New York who was a non-alcoholic
priest from Lebanon, and he knew about the tough alcoholism problem over there, and so
he was asking our help in how a non-alcoholic could start an AA group over there.
So we told him about Johnny O, and told him to get in touch with Johnny O, and Johnny
O could help him.
And that's exactly what happened.
And then within a week, strangely enough, you know, we don't get that many letters
from Lebanon, but about a week later we get a letter from a student over there, a young
student, who said,
A friend of mine has an alcoholic problem, and he wanted information on AA.
And so, you know, we're used to this, and we said, Well, tell your friend to get in
touch with Johnny O over there.
And so he did.
And pretty soon Johnny O wrote a letter back that they had eight members, including this
student who had written this.
And lo and behold, a couple of women.
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who are you?
Who are you?
Who are you?
Who are you?
And I think that Johnny O had come to the meeting of the Marines over there, and then
they had gone back, and they were trying to get a group started out in the civilian world.
And each time that Johnny wrote us, he got friendlier and friendlier, and, you know,
he shared more of himself.
And he had a delightful way of signing each letter, he would say.
His first letter was signed, I think, Bewildered in Beirut, Johnny O.
And the next one would be Bothered in Beirut.
And he would sign it with, Bound in Beirut.
in Beirut and he would sign Johnny O you know and we just cherished those letters and then of course
came the tragic uh terrorism act of blowing up the headquarters which killed hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of Marines we just hung on every uh day for a while and pretty soon the casualty list
came out and there was Johnny Olsen's name well can you tell us about it now it just broke up
everybody in the office particularly the uh the girls who had written to this young man and
they were very heavy-hearted and and uh finally Lois Fisher who was the last one to have written
to him she said would you mind if I write to his home group down in in Lejeune and and tell them
the story about what happened to this member of their group that went over and carried the message
we of course we didn't know what had happened to the group or anybody
over there but we didn't know what had happened to the group or anybody over there but we didn't
know what had happened to the group or anybody over there but I said sure by all means do so she
did and and then as she put the letter in the outbox miraculously in the inbox came a letter
from one of these women over in Beirut who had gotten the message from Johnny O and they were
telling us about this uh this young man and what had happened to him uh but they were saying that
you know his life was not in vain as far as AA was concerned because they were they were carrying on
and they now had a group going in the civilian part of Lebanon so that's the way that the message
is carried isn't it well uh I certainly had no intention of telling you all of this today except
that it turns out we have a Moorhead connection and lo and behold we have over here Johnny's older
brother who is in AA in Moorhead and Johnny's brother-in-law is it uh you know there's Ron and
and uh
it's the other name Ron and Gary uh why don't you stand up and be recognized yeah
but you know I just can't help but think that
who knows decades from now maybe when there is some peace over in
Beirut uh I'm personally confident that there will be many many many
members eventually of Alcoholics Anonymous over in Lebanon and I'm equally convinced that this
Johnny will become legendary he is already and uh that they'll be looking to him you see as the
founder of AA in Lebanon just as we look to our co-founders here so I think that's a thrilling
thing well um just to tell you a little bit about what I was like and what happened and
what it's like now um as you've heard uh I come from Kansas and uh there was nothing remarkable
about my childhood except that I was an only child and uh that my father uh being in the
depression days he uh had to move around quite a bit uh job to job sort of and so we moved every
single year of my life up until the time that I was in high school and I tell you this only because
if you can picture this shy introverted skinny kid uh being moved into a a new school situation for
example uh you know any of you who've moved around or go into a new school you know what happens when
you're the new the new boy in the school all of the other boys there sort of uh test you out
which really means beating you up and so uh I spent you know a good many years of my life
being beat up because I would uh not that I'm complaining about it I had a very happy childhood
except that as I would go into a new community of course I didn't know anybody and I I found it very
hard to make friends and I really felt rejected and and kind of alone and uh by the time that I
came out of my shell enough to make a friend and really begin to feel a part of the place then poor
dad would have to pull up stakes and we'd move on and into a new school the same thing that would go
on well as a result of this uh I kind of retreated into my dream world I related so much to what you
said there this morning about the same thing Don maybe we're many of us alcoholics are that way
because uh I I really dealt with most things in my life by uh by fantasizing about them by having
daydreams about them and uh and as a part of this I think I I read a lot I read all the fiction and
I was living my life really in the stories that I was reading
and I was a tremendous movie goer I think I saw every not seriously I think I saw every single
movie that was made through a good many years of my of my childhood and I related to the hero of
every single one of those movies I mean I was living his life and particularly the ones that
showed sophisticated life in New York I mean boy when Fred Astaire was uh up there on the screen
going across Central Park with Ginger Rogers man that was me I could just see myself up there
living that kind of a life someday uh and uh as a result of of also of doing a lot of reading I did
very well in school and of course my parents gave me a lot of strokes for this and they led me to
think that I was going to absolutely set the world on fire I was I was one of the great geniuses of
all time and uh and I was to really live that way
well this gave me kind of I think very young some very high unrealistic expectations of myself and
things that I really couldn't ever live up to my family expected things of me that I somehow or
other couldn't live up to and I think that this sort of made me an absolute sitting duck for
alcoholism or for alcohol when it came along well with me it came along when uh I was in
college
and I uh had I drank and it was just the usual beer bust kind of drinking uh and uh I when I had
decided that I wanted to be a writer and uh and I did a lot of writing in in college and as a result
I actually sold an article to a national magazine while I was still in college and that was very
very heady stuff for me kind of what I expected of myself you understand at this stage but um I
immediately uh uh beetled back to New York just as quick as I could after college and to make my
living as a writer in the Big city and I was going to go back and of course i was going to
write the Great American novel or The Great American screenplay or The Great American play
and I was going to live just like I had seen it up there on the silver screen
uh well it turned out that the only writing job that I could get with with a big company I worked
on their company magazine very good job doing exactly what I wanted to do杯
but mind you it was a little step down from this this image that i had had already set for myself
and uh the main thing that happened in this big company that i joined and incidentally i was with
them for the next 33 years which is more of a tribute to their ignorance than to their
generosity or their understanding they just didn't know what to do with me as i when i finally became
a a drunk they did this was long before there was any policies or any employee assistance programs
and they just sort of swept you under the rug that was their only way of dealing with it but anyway
when i first went there i was thrown of course with a lot of people older than myself i was 21
years old at this time and most of the other people were somewhat older and a good deal more
sophisticated than i was fresh from kansas in my green aberdeen suit and two-tone shoes and so
they would go down after work for a martini or a manhattan
and i would go they would invite me to go down with them and of course i i was just delighted to
do this because again it was exactly the pattern of life that i had pictured for myself so i became
at 21 a daily drinker and i was to remain a daily drinker for the rest of my of my entire drinking
career until the days that i came into into aa there were a few red flags of alcoholism that i
could have seen and
in those early days but i chose to ignore them one for example i was dating a a young lady who
lived over in brooklyn and i lived in manhattan so we would go out for a big big night on the town
in manhattan and i would we'd get on the subway and i'd take her home over into brooklyn
then i'd get back on the subway to head back to manhattan fairly late at night and i would
go to sleep and the next thing i knew i i would be wake up
by somebody shaking me or kicking me on the foot and they say 207th street the bronx end of the line
and i'd be way way up north and the far reaches of new york city and i would
stumble off the train and across the platform and onto another train going downtown back toward
manhattan again and then the next thing you know i would be waked up by somebody shaking me
kicking me in the foot and saying coney island everybody out i was 70 miles away
clear at the other end of new york city and i would stumble off and get on another train and
the whole thing would be repeated and i would spend the whole night riding the damn subway
now that's not unusual for the winos and the bums but i didn't identify with that in those days you
know it was just something that that i did well uh along came the war years and i went into the
navy as bessie has told you i was a gunnery officer on a destroyer escort and uh i was a
also i worked as a as a writer at my trade in the navy and when we came back to manhattan i worked
briefly for a magazine and look magazine which was a big magazine at that time but i really had
a better job back where i had started with this big company so i went back there and and started
into what is now called public relations and as a writer and as a manager really by that time and
my drinking
uh which had subsided somewhat while i was on switch on shipboard because i couldn't drink
at all on shipboard but of course we really made up for it when we went ashore and i got into my
first disciplinary trouble when i was in the navy uh disciplinary trouble with my drinking but uh
when the uh when the when i got back to to manhattan uh to new york
i just picked up with the martinis and uh i became as bessie has mentioned
i was already having a lot of troubles not so much troubles with my drinking but i was having
troubles with my life now one of the troubles that i was having was i shook a lot uh i really had
the shakes you know except that in my case it wasn't so much the shakes as the leaps and i i
couldn't you know pick up a glass like that without the possibility of knocking it over or
spilling it before i could get it up to my mouth
and this spread in other areas of my life particularly i remember eating soup
that was very hard i had an important business luncheon you know i would get the soup spoon
down there and get it loaded all right and i'd get it up about halfway and then it was starting
at my dish you know all over their soup would go all over and so embarrassing you know and so
my solution was of course to quit eating soup and uh which everybody nods everybody relates to that
all right uh and uh and of course there were a lot of other things that i i couldn't do but then
i discovered this miraculous fact of life that if i had a drink this internal shaking
apart that was just you know just driving me up a wall or this shaking of my hands this tremors
would just subside and this peace would come over me and i could do anything you know i could do it
i could lift up glasses i could eat soup i could sign my name i could do all kinds of things that
i just couldn't do otherwise and my friends from that moment on i was seriously hooked
with alcohol because i really couldn't function without having to have a drink
i read something in the grapevine about two or three years ago i got to run this thing down too
rita wherever you are but there was an article by a fellow from either australia or new zealand
and he was talking about this this phenomenon that we so many of us alcoholics go through
namely that we have to have a drink to do something which to anybody else is a normal
thing and he said at any time that an alcoholic has to have a drink in order to do anything
that is normal to anybody else such as answering the door or
making love
or any of those kind of things then the alcoholic gives up forever and absolutely the possibility
of ever doing that particular thing again without a drink and that i relate to absolutely i remember
that when i had my first morning drink which was at about this stage uh i just had to have a drink
to get in and get to work well uh i never again went into work without having a morning drink
of beer because nobody was telling you to drink whatever you want to but people have no idea
they know this is about some more deeper love but just at that point the alcoholics
get there about cherry
енд which isisten to the
alcoholics
and the recording on the window in the first time the mostly known because the really pretty
would go around all the time by Jerry
too
as the
to the door and you know i see you all relate to that too
and i think i was having a lot of trouble with was dealing with criticism uh now um you know
whenever i was reprimanded about anything uh or criticized in any way i really had a terrible time
dealing with that i still do incidentally to some extent but then it was it was really terrible now
uh being a writer all writers have editors and the editor is paid to criticize the writer's copy
so most writers live with this but to me i just i just resented the heck out of this boob of an
editor who had the nerve to change my deathless prose that i had pictured you know as the absolute
ultimate in in fine writing but again i think it is really important for geography to be tariffed
more and more often than i have ever wanted but again if you're a writer you're talking about
literature that has a very too surakesh and Dracula-esque approach and lounge drives rather than
it has to be treatedospicia like it's so much it's its own viewpoint of things that you put out there that next thing
discover that somewhere along the line, if I had a drink or two, then I just didn't really care
much what he did with my copy. I can handle that pretty well. And of course, whenever I had to make
any kind of a business presentation or any kind of a speech before people, my God, how I used to
agonize over that. Or any kind of a social gathering, boy, you know, to go out to a party,
of course I had to fortify myself in any of these kind of situations. Didn't we all? Didn't I have
to fortify myself in order to do anything like this? Of course, the catch was not to over-fortify
yourself so that you would get up there at the very time that was most important to you to make
a really good impression and you'd make an absolute ass of yourself. And I've also been through that
on some occasions with this long-suffering company particularly. Also, I was having trouble
lying. That shouldn't be a problem, really, but I was troubled, I believe, kind of internally
by the fact that I wasn't even intending not to tell the truth, and yet I was not telling the
truth always, particularly to Betsy about where I had been or what I had been doing when I was
late at home or late home or something like that. And I believe that I've been brought up to believe
that a gentleman's word is his bond and, you know,
a person of good character doesn't tell untruths and this kind of thing. And so I was, I think,
kind of troubled internally. There's a great old guy who was a member of our group, my home group
up in Connecticut, who was actually one of the first hundred members of AA. He's dead now,
but a wonderful old man. And he used to, one of the things he used to say is that alcoholics have
a goosey conscience. And I think that's absolutely true. At least my conscience was kind of goosey
with regard to this lying. And I want to tell you about,
something that I read just a couple of years ago by a non-alcoholic psychiatrist named Dr. Tversky,
Dr. Abraham Tversky, who practices in Pittsburgh. And he practices, he specializes in the treatment
of alcoholics. And what I was reading was an article that Tversky had written to fellow
doctors to tell them about the difficulties of specializing in alcoholics and what to look for
and how to identify the disease.
And all this kind of thing. But he was saying that one of the troubles that a psychiatrist has
with the alcoholic is that the alcoholic comes to him for help and then lies, right? Lies right
through his teeth about what's wrong with him, see? And how this peculiar this is. And he said,
this is Tversky now, he said that the most helpful advice that he had ever gotten with regard to this
was when he was starting practice and he got this advice from a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And
he had been complaining to this member of AA about the fact that his alcoholic patients lied to him
so much. And the AA member had said to Dr. Tversky, he said, well, doctor, he said, actually, he says,
you know, you can tell when an alcoholic is lying just by watching his lips. And Tversky said,
was that right? Well, how is that? And the AA member said, if his lips are moving, he's lying.
Well, I was having a lot of troubles just plain coping with life. I wasn't attributing it to booze
particularly, but I was having trouble coping with life. Now, before I go any further, I want
to tell you that what I,
want to tell you really in this whole talk or what's left of it is that I want to pass along
really something that I heard from an AA member when I first came in. And I was on my first
business trip down to Houston, Texas. And I was a little bit apprehensive about going on a business
trip. I was pretty fresh sober and I didn't trust myself on the plane and I didn't know what I was
going to do with myself when I got down to Houston. So I consulted with my sponsor, who was
a
wonderful guy. And he said, well, he told me what to do on the plane, how to turn down a drink. And
then he said, when you get to Houston, I said, just look up AA in the phone book and call them
and go to a meeting right away. So that's what I did. And after I checked into the hotel, I called,
sure enough, there was a meeting going on. So quite a choice of meetings, actually,
although this is many years ago. And so I tore out to this clubhouse where they were having a
meeting. And just as I went into the meeting, there was an old timer who was leading the meeting.
And he was saying something that really changed my whole view of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I would
like to share it with you. What he was saying was that AA doesn't teach us how to handle our
drinking. He said, AA teaches us, it doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. It teaches us how
to handle sobriety. And that's the thing that we couldn't handle in the first place. And that's why
we drank.
And you know, that just opened my eyes. That just lit a light bulb of an idea over my head. Because
that just really told the story of my life. This guy went on to say that many of us have
quit at various times in our lives, under pressure, or in prison, or in hospitals, or
for land, or what have you. So quitting is not so impossible for the alcoholic.
But what is impossible for the alcoholic is to stay quit.
In other words, you always go back to drinking as a drinking alcoholic without AA. And the reason
is that you can't handle sobriety. And boy, that just makes so much sense to me. And it also
explains an awful lot to me in answer to the civilian friends of mine, who, as Betsy was saying,
they'll say to you, why do you still go to those meetings? They'll say, you haven't had a drink
for X number of years. You don't have a drinking problem. Why do you go to those meetings? And you
know, it's not so simple. It's not so simple. It's not so simple. It's not so simple. It's not so
simple. But it's pretty hard to explain to the civilian, to make them understand. Because it is
true, I do not have a drinking problem. And I haven't had a drinking problem for nearly 23 years.
And as long as I don't drink, as long as I stay away from one drink one day at a time and go to
AA meetings, I'm not going to have a drinking problem. But I have the problem of coping with
life without drinking every single cotton-picking day to this day.
And of course, that's what I learn at AA meetings. And as there's a well-known speaker from
California who always says in his talk, there's not a single chapter in the big book that tells
us how to stop drinking. There's not a single page of the big book that tells us how to stop
drinking. There's not a single sentence of the big book that tells us how to stop drinking.
What the AA, what the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous tells us is how to live so that,
you know, we don't have to drink. So that's really the message. But of course, that isn't
the message that I had back in those drinking days. And I was having trouble coping with life
in so many ways. I'll just tell you one example that will give you a little idea. And this was
when Betsy's parents, these wonderful people from back in Kansas, were celebrating, of all things,
their 50th wedding anniversary, their golden wedding anniversary. And they were going to
celebrate it back with us. And that meant that Betsy and I were going to celebrate it back with
us. And Betsy's family, which, as she says, was a large, loving family, were all going together at
our house, 20 or 30 people. And here I am still basically inside the skinny, introverted, shy kid,
except now, of course, I'm a raging extrovert with the help of booze. And I'm having to relate to all
of these wonderful people. And I love them, and they love me, and there should have been no
problem at all. But I still had to fortify myself to be able to be with them. So on this particular
day, we're going to celebrate it back with us. And I'm going to celebrate it back with us. And
when Betsy, it never bugged me about my drinking, but on this particular day, she said to me,
as I went off on the train to go into New York, she said, darling, you know how important tonight
is, what a great occasion it is. And she said, I just hope that today you won't have too big a
lunch. And of course, I knew what she meant, and she knew that I knew what she meant. And
you know what happened. I had a very big lunch indeed. I didn't have any food, but
But I had a very big lunch, and it continued into the afternoon at the bar near the office,
and it continued on the barcar on the train on the way home.
So when I got out to Connecticut, I got down off the train with my coat buttoned up crooked
and the hat on the side of my head staggering down off of the train, just enough to break
her heart, of course.
And she was noticeably cool to me as she went toward home.
And when I got there, everybody was in summertime, and everybody was gathered in the patio out
and back.
And I went in the front door, and of course, I made a beeline for the pantry where the
bar was set up, because of course, I sure did need a drink.
And so I got one, and I don't recall really the next 20 or 30 minutes, probably, at all.
The next thing I saw was a woman.
She was a woman.
She was a woman.
She was a woman.
She was a woman.
She was a woman.
And the last thing that I really remember is they're hauling me out from under the grand
piano where I had taken refuge, clutching this drink to my breast because I, paranoia,
I knew that they were after me, and I knew that they were going, when they got me, they
were going to take the drink away from me, which is, of course, exactly what happened.
And they sent me to my room for the rest of the evening.
Now, I was at this time forty-four years old.
But that's how I was coping with life at that stage of my life and my drinking.
Well, it was at about this stage that I looked a lot different than I do now, I trust.
I was about some forty pounds heavier.
I had a great big extended abdomen, taut as a drum.
I had jowls and a puffy face, and little broken blood vessels all over my skin, and yellow
eyes, and I was just a mess.
And I, of course, was a round-the-clock drinker by this time, absolutely a raging alcoholic.
And in the midst of this, I was drinking.
I was drinking.
And in the midst of this, I was aware of the fact that I had a lump here in my abdomen,
and a hard lump, a growing lump.
And of course, it just scared the living daylights out of me.
And so I finally got up courage enough to make a date with my doctor, and I went there,
and he laid me out on the table, and he poked around in there, you know, and then he asked
me something which probably some of you, at least, have experienced with a doctor.
He asked me this completely irrelevant question.
He said,
Bobby, how much do you drink?
Which I thought was an odd question for a person dying of cancer, but I didn't lie to
him.
This was once.
I didn't say, oh, two beers, or something like that.
I quickly added it up, and what I was drinking, by the way, at this time was, at this time,
I always drank, for years and years and years, I drank a shot of 100-proof vodka chased with
Valentine's Ale.
And that was my Russian Boilermaker.
That was my Russian Boilermaker.
That was my drink.
And I used to, you know, I had these pretty continuously all day long.
And so I said, well, I have about eight or nine drinks a day.
And he looked startled, and he said, you mean every day?
I said, of course, every day.
And he said, well, I think we have the root of your problem here.
So he gave me a test on my liver, liver function, and of course, it was badly damaged.
I was really in bad shape.
And so he sat me down.
And he told me the facts of life.
He told me what kind of a terrible death that I was headed for if I continued to drink.
He told me that there are some people in the world who can drink, and there are some people
who can't drink.
And then I was in the latter category.
And he said that when I saw a bottle of any kind of thing to drink, that I should see
on the label a skull and crossbones, because he said, Bob, he says, that's what it is to
you.
It's poison.
And he told me all these good things.
And I really took him to heart.
And believe it or not, without any AA, because he didn't mention AA, I don't think he knew
anything about AA, and he didn't mention AA to me.
He just told me I had to quit drinking.
And just as this old-time member was to say in Houston later on, I did quit.
And at a time in my life when I would have sworn to you that I couldn't go two hours
without drinking or I would climb the wall, I was able to quit for ten months on my own,
and I was able to quit.
And I was able to quit.
And I was able to quit.
And I was able to quit.
And I was able to quit.
On my own, out of fear alone and without the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But of course, sobriety was something that I really couldn't cope with.
I had relied on booze to...
It wasn't the problem, it was the answer to my life at this point.
All right?
But it's always something you've got to process and then try again, by saying, It's
OK to have these spirits health the way I want them to.
And so I still had to deal with criticisms, and I still had to make these presentations,
and I still had to do all these things that I was doing, except that I didn't have the
help of booze.
But it was an uncomfortable time.
So we still can control our 주세요.
though not an impossible time and i finally got a little bit better and a little bit better and i
kept going back to the doctor for examinations and after 10 months why he said to me after the
examination he set me down and he said it's just remarkable he said you have made a wonderful
uh recovery your your liver is is probably as good it isn't perfect but it's as good as it's
ever going to be and he said uh you don't need to come back well i've been kind of preparing for
this moment and uh so very casually uh i said well uh john i said does this mean that uh oh you
know after i've had a after i've been out cutting the lawn on a hot summer's day i might have
possibly a cold beer pretty funny because the guy last night on the radio i don't know how many of
you heard the radio program we were on last night but a fellow called in and he asked exactly that
he said if i take a glass of beer after a
cutting
the lawn on a hot day does that mean i'm an alcoholic and i i had a notion to share my
whole story with him but it would take a little too long and um so uh now i said uh perhaps i
could have occasionally a fine wine with dinner which was a crock you know i i never had that
kind of a drinker and uh so my doctor again looked kind of troubled but he said to me the fatal words
to the alcoholic he said well bob
one won't hurt you well you know that was translated in my mind immediately i got in a car
and i tore home and i burst into bessie in the kitchen and you know what i said then i said guess
what i can drink again and of course she was delighted to hear this i headed for the train and
i lit into the grockfeller center where i was working and i went down to the english grill bar
and i said sam set them up again where are you going to drink again and i said well i'm going to
drink and we're in business again and so he set up the valentine's ale and the vodka and i had a
drink and of course it didn't hurt me and uh you know the story in a few days i had another one
that didn't hurt me and a few weeks it was christmas time and whoever heard of going to
christmas parties without having a drink or really two drinks you know if one doesn't hurt you two
isn't gonna hurt you so i had a couple at the christmas time and uh then i went on a long
i had no intention of going back to drinking and yet mysteriously when i got back on that trip i was
just as sick just as round the clock just as compulsive drinking and worse that i as i was
when i had gone to the doctor originally well what followed was two years of absolutely crazy
alcoholic drinking and i sickened rapidly i won't bore you with all of the clinical details but one
thing that happens with the cirrhosis of the liver is that your liver stops manufacturing the
substance that makes a clot makes your blood clot and so you become a bleeder and i became a
terrible bleeder i i i got these massive nosebleeds and i didn't know why of course but uh i have a
couple of times in my office i had such massive nosebleeds that once they took me out in a
wheelchair and once they took me out on a stretcher from my office took me down to the infirmary where
they cauterized my nose and they stuffed a lot of gauze up there and they stuffed a lot of cotton
up there and uh to the point that it really made a difference
and i was very difficult to drink but not so that i couldn't i'll tell you that for sure and uh and i
developed bad bruises all over my body uh i uh i would get these huge
purple and green and yellow and blue bruises uh and some of it was because at this time of my life
i was falling over a lot of furniture and running into a lot of walls and even falling down and
quite a bit but uh some of it was just plain spontaneous bruising because your capillaries
just start bleeding underneath your skin and i was vomiting a lot in fact the last five years
that i drank i vomited every single morning of my life uh but uh you know you get you get to where
this is just the thing that you accept if you're gonna drink you're gonna vomit and that's uh
then you gotta drink so that's that's the end of that argument uh i um uh
i got awful weak uh i was traveling a lot in these days even then even yet uh and mostly
by train because i loved those club guards on the trains and uh i got to the point where i couldn't
lift up my suitcases to to get them into the train i there was a faucet in our house that worked kind
of hard a hot water faucet and i got to where i couldn't turn the hot water off and on because i
was so bloody weak and uh of course i had
i was really not supposed to be drinking at all you understand because i'm a sick man and so
most of my drinking had to be for me undercover which meant that instead of going to the fancy
bars and the fancy clubs in new york which had been my habit living up to this image that i had
put up for myself from early childhood on now my drinking was from a vodka bottle in a paper
bag that i carried around in a briefcase with me no more were pockets enough and so i carried this
bottle in a briefcase and i would go in in the morning on the train and i would cower in a corner
of the car on the train hoping that nobody would speak to me because i was sweating and i was
shaking apart and it was an interminable time going into new york in fact sometimes i got off
at 125th street went down bought a drink in a bar there so i could go up get back on the train and
go on into another 10 minutes into new york city but i just couldn't even make it that last 10
minutes but when i could i would immediately get off the train
through Grand Central Station down into this dingy grimy men's room there into one of the stalls
get the briefcase open get the paper bag out get the top off of the vodka you know and get it up
to your lips shaking apart with the vodka spilling down your chin and down your front just so I could
get energy enough to to get to work and of course when I got to work I had to have booze every little
while a little like Rita was telling about a little earlier today and so that meant that
whenever of course I couldn't do any drinking in my office because I wasn't I just wasn't done
and I couldn't go down to the bars anymore so that meant I had to drink in the men's room in
the office and so that meant that whenever I went in to go to the men's room I had to carry my
briefcase with me and it was no secret when I came to the second step of Alcoholics Anonymous
and as far as the office
was concerned and that insanity so that was the pattern of my life when i went on a business trip
out to chicago and what happened out there was what my doctor had warned me would happen two
years before and i didn't believe him i thought i could beat the system i'd long since quit
eating at all and my as i say my liver was in terrible shape and i'd been carousing around
chicago on this business trip working hard during the day and staying up all night and uh i had a
massive esophageal hemorrhage and i lost about half the blood in my body in about two three hours
vomiting up enormous quantities and losing it rectally and um and of course losing consciousness
and i remember uh just glimpses of sitting in a little park across from the blackstone hotel
where i was staying there and uh it was about this well it was uh it was in october it was
a kind of a late fall time of year very bleak and very cold and i was
sitting there going into the bushes now and then to throw up again with this
blood coming all the time and I knew that I was dying and I I was also
wallowing in this kind of self-pity that we get into as alcoholics and I was
thinking well it's just as well if I do go ahead and die because Betsy's young
and pretty and she'll get another husband and he'll be a better husband to
her than I am father to my children and and I was just wallowing in this kind of
garbage you know and yet it was another part of me that was saying God it's you
know it's lonely it's terrible here I'm such a long ways from home I'm 1,300
miles from home I'm in Chicago and who wants to die in Chicago so I let the
hotel call their house doctor and he immediately knew what was wrong with me
and the next thing I knew I heard that he was going to die in Chicago and I
heard the sirens and they're rolling me off on to a from the bed I was back in
bed by now and and I in onto a a stretcher and into this ambulance and
they had the blood transfusion rigged up and I didn't even know what what
hospital I was going to or what hospital I was in for several days and and I woke
up with my both arms tied down and and intravenous feeding going into one arm
and blood transfusions into the other I don't know how much blood I got but a
lot and because there was no treatment for this they just
wait for the blood to stop for you to stop bleeding inside if you don't stop bleeding you
die it's that simple and most people don't stop bleeding but i stopped and i got more blood inside
me and and pretty soon a few days later i was feeling well enough that they discharged me but
again like my doctor had they told me that if i ever had another drink it would well be my last
and i really had learned my lesson right right two months football season i was going to a football
game who ever heard of going to a football game without a drink i ask as rational people
and so of course i i was not going to aa nobody had mentioned aa to me yet and so i didn't know
it was the first drink that got you drunk and so i had that drink
and i
went to the football game and of course the obsession and the compulsion was
right back at me I was in the grip of it and I was just as bad as ever and worse
all the time and by now I was waking up in the middle of the night with these
semi hallucinations things swimming in front of my eyes whether I had my eyes
closed or open Betsy would be next to me in our double bed and I would hear her
weeping into the pillow because she was in such desperation I knew that I was
causing her terrible unhappiness not knowing really what was going to happen
to her and not knowing what was going to happen to me but and needing a drink
something terrible really not having the guts to get up and get it and knowing
somehow that the doom was going to happen to me the next day there was
always this feeling of impending doom somebody said that again in an AA
article just a few months ago that as alcoholics we live with a sense of
impending joy
you
what a difference but I knew something terrible was going to happen to me and I
just didn't know what and this was the stage that then I was I was in at this
time and so and a few months a few weeks after this episode I of course had
another massive esophageal hemorrhage and this time it was even worse than the
first one and in the hospital they rang a code 500 on me which means the patient
is dying and it brings that all the available doctors and it brings the
oxygen and if you're a Catholic it brings the priest and you know what
whatever to help in that situation and yet somehow I didn't die and I had
really made my peace with my maker at that time I best Betsy has mentioned I
was a religious person not a spiritual person at all but I was a religious
person and I really had made my peace with my god that night and yet I woke up
in the morning and again somehow there by some miracle with a lot of help the
doctors I began to get well from the bleeding and at the end of four or five
days they declared the ambulatory and so that meant that I could get up out of
bed and I pulled on my shirt and my pants and my shoes and I am belated out
at the hospital and down to the nearest liquor store which was about a block
away got a bottle of vodka smuggled it back into the hospital and put it in my
my waist basket and removed everything from the hospital shut the door and and did the morning check and did the hospital check and drink of the прив 真的跑ás o
my room and was sucking away on it happily with the bandages on my arms from the blood transfusion
so you see how utterly insane i was at that time well my doctor at this stage to nobody's surprise
came in and said i am giving you up as a patient he said i cannot be responsible for you any longer
he said you will have to go to a psychiatrist well i had never heard of such a thing i certainly
wasn't insane and i was in no position to argue however so i went to this psychiatrist and i want
you to just think for a second how the higher power manifested himself in this alcoholic's life
on that occasion because he sent me to this psychiatrist who practiced in the same suite
of offices as the doctor that had just discharged me that's the only reason that he sent me to him
and yet the name of the man that he sent me to
was dr harry tebow the professional person who knew more about alcoholism than any other
professional in the world at that time and at that very moment he was serving as a non-alcoholic
trustee on the general service board of your alcoholics anonymous but of course he didn't
let me know that he talked to me just twice and he talked to betsy once and he said to her
i cannot help your husband he has an iron curtain drawn down between
him and the rest of the world really between him and reality because my friends at this time i was
at that stage that they talked about in the doctor's opinion where the alcoholic cannot
differentiate between what is real and what is unreal and i was living in such a complete world
of fantasy and such a complete self-centered world of belief that i was somehow superhuman that
that i just i couldn't relate to the real world
and so and then dr dr tebow had me come in and he told me that the same thing he said he couldn't
really help me he said you don't really have time enough to be helped you're going to die and he
said there's only one place where you can get help and that's an organization called alcoholics
anonymous and he said i know a person who has been through some of the things that you've been
through and he said i think that he would be glad to talk to you if you would like to call him
you know what
i said i said i don't want to bother him and dr tebow said to me he gave me a little lesson in
alcoholics anonymous at that point he said well he laughed and he said well bobby said you know he
wouldn't consider it a bother he said these these aas they don't consider it a bother they think
that they do it for their own sake and that sounded peculiar to me you know but i bought it
and uh still i wouldn't call and uh so dr tebow
called stew jones the man who was to become my sponsor now dead god bless him a wonderful sponsor
and uh you know i think about this when i hear discussions at
aa assemblies and regional forums and so on about should we
should we respond to the call from some third person and uh
normally i don't usually go on to you know make a 12-step call unless the alcoholic calls himself
but uh here was a professional man made myself a call in this House but uh here was a professional
man making the call and if stew jones hadn't uh been willing to respond to that call and to come
and call on me even though i would not make the call i i would not be standing here before you
today and you know i've you know i've heard since you know dr bob didn't want to talk to bill either
so sometimes we have to make that cold 12-step call so uh stew took me to some meetings and uh
i enjoyed them but i didn't quit drinking i was too sick i was too mochus i was just too far gone
and so at the end of about a week uh it has now it is now near the end of the story and it is
the it is on july 3rd of 1961 and uh that on on that uh date the uh the little town of old
greenwich connecticut was having its annual fireworks display and uh
we're going to talk a little bit about that but i'm going to talk a little bit about that
and uh we're going to talk a little bit about that and uh we're going to talk a little bit about that
we were supposed to have gone as a family to meet with some other families for some hot dogs
and hamburgers and then go down and watch the fireworks display and although we had long since
given up almost all of our social contacts and i was a terribly sick cookie at this point
uh why betsy for the sake of the kids we went ahead and went through with this and we went
over to this neighbor's house and man it was a great setup for the drinking alcoholic because
they were the the hot dogs and the hamburgers were on the grills out in
the back the bathroom was inside in between was the kitchen where they had their booze
set up and of course you have to go in about every 15 minutes to go to the bathroom right
and every time i'd go through that kitchen i'd take a pull on the vodka and so i was in you know
terror i would over had been hipping anyway all day but i was in just really bent pretty bad out
of shape by the time that the little picnic was through and we got in the car and we went down to
the village to the village green this little park down there where they were having the fireworks
and of course it was white by this time it was dark the fireworks display had already started and
the cars were the the streets were just crowded with parked cars so grumpily i got i left the
family off uh and i went to park the car uh long ways away and uh by the time i got back of course
it was even later you got a picture the the the green sword of this village green was about as
crowded as this room is here now with the people's uh
blankets and their tablecloths spread out and their perambulators and their kids and all
and i am not very steady on my feet anyway and when i get back i can't remember where the family
said they were going to be if indeed we had even made any arrangements to meet and i don't remember
whether we did or didn't but anyhow i didn't know where they were so i started out to hunt for them
and of course i was stumbling over these poor people in the in the park and they were unhappy
at me and i was you know falling around
and and then bam off would go this tremendous explosion up in the sky and down around me would
come this shower of fire and in this moment of explosion of course i could look down and i could
see everybody and they would be looking up at me kind of angrily you know like this
and then it would be all dark again and i would go stumbling on and then bam off would go another
one of these big explosions and more of these sparks coming down around me and
this one
on and honest to god to me it was just like a scene out of daddy's inferno
at this stage in my life and then you know what happens at the end of the fireworks display it goes
boom boom blam blam and all these sparks come down and then the
the fireman's band gets up and they play america the beautiful or the star spangled banner and
everybody stands up and they fold their blankets and they put the kids in the baby carriages and
and they go off and there i am uh i still haven't found the family uh i didn't really know what to do
uh i i reasoned to myself well they are probably where the car is parked and then i thought that's
pretty stupid because they don't know where the cars parked and then i realized i didn't know where
the car was parked so i just trailed off after the last of the people who were leaving this park and
went up a rather steep hill and as i was staggering up after them something that you people had said
to me during this week that i was going to these aa meetings just hit me like a ton of brick and
that was that part of the first step because i just realized that my life was unmanageable
and so i sat down at the edge of this other street which was my way of reacting to most things and
cried
and i was sitting there crying when my sister-in-law came and found me and put her arms
around me and said there there dear boy and led me off to where the family had indeed found where
the car was parked there they were and so we went off home now i want to tell you what scene
presented itself to me there because when i went in the kitchen there was a drinking buddy of mine
named don who had been a drinking buddy on the bar car for a good many years
and
um during this week of confusion of course i'd been pretty much out of touch with the bar car
and everything because i wasn't even commuting and uh so he was sitting there with a friend with
another man and the big book alcoholics anonymous was spread out on the table in the kitchen uh it
was really a sort of a classic 12-step scene except for one detail don was drunker than i was
he had come to aa the week before
he had been to a few meetings he had also been down in the park and he had seen in what bad
shape i was and so he had hurried home gotten an aa friend gotten his copy of the big book
and he was making his first 12-step call
the beautiful part of the story is that don got sober about seven years later
and i was his sponsor and he's sober to this day
anyway the next morning i got up and came to the scene which betsy has described for you where they
had commitment papers for me the nerve of them and they were really discussing between her and
the doctor and this friend and my boss and so on to where i was to be committed and one was a state
hospital and one was a sanitarium and one was a nut house and finally i opted for this high watch
farm which is a a drop farm they call them treatment facilities today or rehabilitation
centers or some such things but what this was was a drunk farm you went there to be soured up
and to dry out but this is a remarkable place because it is totally aa there aren't any
counselors there aren't any doctors there aren't any professionals what you got is a place to have
good food a spiritual surrounding and an unlimited amount of aa and their recovery rate is astonishing
and so after a couple of weeks up here
i went in as betsy says kicking and screaming i was full of anger and hostility and rage and hate
and resentment and self-pity and every kind of a cesspool type of emotion that you can imagine
and i complained to everybody who would listen when i got up there that i wasn't really an
alcoholic i was there as a victim of a monstrous conspiracy which was to a certain extent true the
last part of that was anyway
uh but uh thanks to people like you coming up there to share their experience strength and
hope with us who were guests at the farm as they called us uh well i began to see that it was
indeed possible to live sober productive life without booze and you know something
that was the first time that this thought had ever entered my head from the time that i had
taken the first drink until that moment i had never it had never occurred to me that it would
be possible to live certainly not to live happily without drink but after a couple of weeks up there
at the farm i did come back i affiliated with the local groups there in greenwich again i was shy
introverted not at all sure that i could stay sober but i had wonderful sponsorship god they
just wouldn't let me not come to meetings i would have all kinds of excuses oh tonight i have to
write my checks or you know tonight i have to do this or that
they would say we'll be by to pick you up at 8 15. at 8 15 they would show up and i would be off to
another meeting and as betsy says i became very uh involved very uh active in service almost
immediately and uh have continued so uh until it culminates in in what i'm doing for you today
um and the the benefits uh are just too too numerous and too
beautiful for me to really put into words uh i do want to say that for me one of the enormous
benefits was uh physical health uh obviously i was uh at that point of pretty sick and uh i i
recovered physically a great deal in in alcoholics anonymous and to the extent that i have become a
physical fitness nut and bore people with it an awful lot uh i i love to ski i ski all winter
i sail in the summertime i i run
every morning uh of the world except this morning i have been restored to sanity after yesterday
i i uh
frost bit my face yesterday in your beautiful manitoba climate when i was out running i'll
be out there again tomorrow morning though if anybody wants to join me but uh today no
but i do run every day and that's when i do my eleventh step and i commune with my higher power
and i sort of get myself asking if somebody's looking at me um i think i'm just running in the
myself in shape for the day and pray for my sobriety during that day. And I run through
a litany of all that I have to be grateful for, because I have a sponsor today who's
very strong on this gratitude business. Attitude of gratitude, he says. And he says that a
grateful alcoholic is a sober alcoholic, and I believe that. I really do. And so I become
again anew each morning, a grateful alcoholic. And of course, as Betsy says, our relationship
with ourselves, with our children has been brought to an entirely new plane since she
recovered in Al-Anon at the same time that I was recovering in AA. And the remarkable
thing about this physical and spiritual and mental recovery is, this is a little secret
that I want to share with all of you.
I want to share with all of you people. We get younger, you know? When I came to AA,
I was an old man. I kid you not. At 45 years old, 44 years old, I was weak and feeble and
looking forward only to who will take care of me the rest of my life, which wasn't very
long. And that was my little attitude. And my wonderful daughter, my wonderful daughter,
my beautiful daughter who's now presented me with three great wonderful grandchildren,
she presented me with a little quotation that I have hanging in my little dressing room
where I dress each morning. It's a quotation from Zorba the Greek in all that great book
and play. And it's where Zorba says, I was so much older then, I am so much younger than
that now. And I mean, I ask you what other fellowship in the whole world can you come
into? I mean, the best words in the whole Bible for my wife and daughter are these.
old and get younger all the time at this one they of course the the great thing has happened is that
i have had at least a glimpse of the possibility of coping with sobriety of handling sobriety
of handling life without having to drink and of course the way that this we learn to do this as
you all know is through the practice of a a's 12 steps and to get rid of the negative feelings and
negative thoughts that we so many of us come in here with with uh with i i certainly was just uh
overpowered with guilt and remorse and all those kind of negative things and you told me that i
had to get rid of those and replace them with with positive thoughts and uh we're uh we are
told that we have to let go of the burdens of the past and the anxieties about the future and to
live a day at a time and of course there's nothing new about this this is a part of every great
philosophy and every great religion
and in the world and yet we are the ones who have kind of distilled this into a
philosophy of life that we practice and we meet together to define from each
other the way that we can live a day at a time and what a great tool this is and
we're granted this serenity to accept the things that we cannot change and
this helped me to get rid of this anger that I used to have and this inability
to handle criticism and when I came into AA they told me that I had to
differentiate between my wants and my needs and I haven't heard this much
recently you know but about that's such a great thing to say to the newcomer
because I was full of wants as you have gathered from my story I was always
full of ambition and grasping and material wants and whenever I had a big
car I wanted a bigger car back in the days when that was good
and
if I had a fine suit I wanted a better suit and everything in life I always
wanted something more and if I got something if I had a want satisfied I
always replaced it with another want and my sponsor said that that's the way it
would always be with your wants but your needs he said would always be satisfied
by a loving God and I can testify to you that that has been my experience in the
time that I have been in Alcoholics Anonymous and of course finally I think
that the
the
the
The great blessing in my particular case was to free me of the need
to live in an unreal world, a world of my own dreams
and a world of my own fantasies, and to avoid reality.
And I get into AA, and lo and behold, what do I find?
I find that this reality that I've been trying to avoid all of these years is beautiful.
Of course, the reality that we have is only the reality of this breath and this moment
as we're gathered here and having all this fun this weekend,
in this very hour, in this very moment.
And I think that finally, at least in my case, and I hope it is in yours too,
that perhaps for the first time in our whole lives, we're at peace.
We're at peace with ourselves.
And we're at peace with our fellow man and those around us.
And we're at peace with...